2022 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 4(1) Since this evolution, many aspects of the refugee definition, which may not have been apparent to the drafters, have been refined in a child-sensitive manner. 57 This can be seen, for example, in the heightened understanding of child-specific forms of harm that inform the notion of persecution.58 In recognition of some child-specific harms, Jason Pobjoy delineates: [o]nly a child can be at risk of infanticide, underage military recruitment, forced child labour, forced underage marriage, child prostitution, child pornography, domestic child abuse, corporal punishment or pre-puberty FGC [female genital circumcision]. Similarly, only a child can be denied a primary education, separated from a parent because of discriminatory custody laws or discriminated against because of [his/]her status as an illegitimate child.59 However, there remains a paucity of guidance as to how a child-sensitive interpretation, with reference to the rights of children, informs the notion of a country of former habitual residence. As is aforementioned, an inequitable lacuna exists in a plain, ordinary interpretation of the refugee definition. This is best understood in the context of a drafting ‘oversight’,60 as such an interpretation is plainly inconsistent with the humanitarian purpose, intended symmetry and equality of status between those with or without a nationality. There are other factors that illuminate this oversight in the application of the notion of a country of former habitual residence to children, which include the temporal scope delineated by the drafters, who then had little foresight or vision as to the predicament of stateless children who would subsequently be born in a country of refuge and face the discriminatory deprivation of core human rights which occasion serious harm to them.61 Their gazes were fixed upon existing and well-known situations and categories of refugees, such as the mass denationalisation and expulsion of Jews across Europe.62 This theme continued in discourse and jurisprudence, referring to beneficiaries of refugee protection as having ‘broken … ties with’ or of leaving their former ‘home country’,63 with little appreciation of future sur place statelessness predicaments, through which a discriminatory nexus may engage the refugee definition. A further permutation to consider is the fact that the drafters had little sense of the human rights dimension of the problem of statelessness and the fact that the discriminatory denial of a nationality might constitute persecution, as opposed to simply being a technical legal problem.64 As will be seen, this drafting oversight and the failure to appreciate child-specific qualities and experiences has produced a body of refugee jurisprudence that largely overlooks the interests of children (in particular, stateless children born abroad). 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 ibid 30. GD (China) (n 44) 18–22 [73]–[84]; Pobjoy (n 38) 5. Pobjoy (n 38) 117. ibid 2. Atle Grahl-Madsen refers to the situation of refugees in the post-war period who were conceived as possessing the formal nationality of their country of origin, with the reality that ‘[t]heir children born abroad will often be awarded “uncertain” or “undecided” status’: GrahlMadsen (n 10) 376. He refers to the Norwegian Law of 8 August 1924, s 9, which refers to children born outside Norway who do not inherit their parent’s nationality or acquire any other nationality. Foster and Lambert (n 17) 26. Atle Grahl-Madsen, ‘The Special Regime of Refugees’ in Gundmunder Alfredsson and P Macalister-Smith (eds), The Land Beyond: Collected Essays on Refugee Law and Policy (Kluwer Law International 2001) 165; Jacques Vernant, The Refugee in the Post-War World (George Allen and Unwin Ltd 1953) 13; Hathaway and Foster (n 23). Foster and Lambert (n 17) 11. 16